


Say It Ain't So

by Merkwerkee



Series: Being Bruno Hamilton [44]
Category: Masters of the Metaverse (Web Series)
Genre: MIA - Freeform, graveyard, not dead but not here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25737343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: Middle-aged superhero Crash Jaxun, seductive yogini Aquamarine, ex-convict Wyatt Maxwell, and Bruno's granddaughter Andi Jaymes took a ship to travel the Metaverse body, mind, and soul to find the Chronicler named Monday and save her from the grasp of a reality-bending entity known simply as a Nightmare. They succeeded, at a cost - now they are lost to the Metaverse so thoroughly that not even Zenda Rhodes can find their remains.Bruno Hamilton is determined to try, anyway.
Series: Being Bruno Hamilton [44]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643020





	Say It Ain't So

“I’m sorry, my friends. I just _can’t_ find them anywhere - and neither can Monday. They saved her - I don’t know how - but...it seems they paid the ultimate price in doing so.”

The words had barely left Zenda's mouth when Bruno snapped into action.

Turning, he made a swift count of the other pilots clustered around to hear Zenda's news and made a quick decision. Bruno was not in the habit of leaving teammates behind unless they were confirmed dead; he would do a great deal more for family. And after all, Zenda hadn't said they were dead - only that he couldn't find them. Bruno could think of at least two instances off the top of his head where people had hidden from the previous Rhodes by taking advantage of his nature. Zenda might be more wily than the previous Rhodes, but there were places he _could not go_ , and Bruno was prepared to search them all for his granddaughter.

Zenda stepped away through reality, and Bruno turned to Pierce, who'd been loitering at the edge of the circle looking pained - Bruno wasn't sure if it was at the news of Monday's rescue, or the fact that the ship had gone missing that was bothering the man, and frankly at this point he didn't care. "Pierce, can you set up the pods to work? Aim them, monitor them, that kind of thing?"

Pierce glanced over at the pods the kid had made, eyes unreadable, before nodding. Bruno squared his shoulders and turned to the rest of them. "Robbins, Thomas, Dr. Clarkson, you take those pods to the last known metaverse this Nightmare was attached to. Harvin, Stone, you're with me. We're going to head to the metaverse most closely adjacent to where they disappeared from."

After a moment of frozen inaction where everyone carefully didn't look at anyone else, the other pilots ground into action. Bruno would have liked to get Pierce to come with his team, but it was more important that they had someone with experience monitoring the pods from this end, and he also had the creeping suspicion he couldn't have gotten the other man to use a pod anyway. He'd been singularly reluctant to travel using anything but the Reliance, and with the ship gone he didn't seem too keen on finding alternate forms of passage.

As Pierce started fiddling with the side of the first pod - Thomas’ pod - before the man stepped into it, Bruno turned to the last two non-pilots in the room.

Mac McPhernon wasn't looking at him, but seemed oddly stricken by the news about Crash and the others. Bruno didn't have a good read on him at the best of times, and the current moment was anything but. It quickly became a moot point as Patric stepped between them and glared up at the much larger man.

"You leave that boy _alone_. You're down four of your super powered folk, and his sister is _dead_ after gettin' mixed up in all this."

Bruno held up a placating hand. "I wouldn't ask it of him; it's you I wanted to talk to. I need you to go to Washington and speak to Congress while I deal with the situation here."

The Irishman frowned. "Would they listen to me? _Really_? Dunno if you've noticed, mate, but I'm not exactly a legal US Citizen - never mind about all terrorism charges. Or the drugs."

Even as he spoke his hands slipped into his pocket to pull out a small unmarked bottle - nearly empty, from the way it rattled he shook out some plain white tablets. Bruno wondered briefly exactly how much of a stash the other man maintained, to still have some even after being stuck in a completely isolated underwater base for a week and then decided he didn't actually want to know. He leaned forward.

"Patric Leibowitz-O'Kelley, you are one of the few men alive who knows a damn thing about metaversal travel that I can trust to deal with this. Getting the others back _has_ to be our top priority; we can't spare any pilots to speak to Congress, so I'm asking you to do it. For me. For Andi. As one 'super powered folk' to another."

His words seemed have struck some sort of nerve; he knew the man had come back from 742 with the ability to repair anything with a touch, but apparently it hadn’t quite hit home before now what that _meant_. Patric covered his mouth with his hand as he looked up at the ceiling, then down at the floor, then finally over to McPhernon. The kid didn't meet his eyes, but was putting things in the go bag - his Archie comics, some explosives Patric had left lying around. The Irishman heaved a sigh before nodding to Bruno.

"Alright. _Alright_ , damn your eyes. We'll take the damn stagecoach and we'll go to D.C. and I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise miracles, mate." He rocked for a moment, like he had something else to say, but seemed to change his mind. Turning, he stalked away cursing everyone in visual range under his breath.

Bruno let him go, and turned to make sure the others had gotten into their pods safely before finally stepping into his own. As the bright, white light that signaled metaversal travel washed over him, he grimly clung to one thought: Missing wasn't dead. He'd find her, come hell or high water.

The Metaverse swept him away.

That mission was followed by another, and then another, and then another. Bruno wasn't sure if it was the Metaverse working with them for once, or if Pierce was that good at making the pods work, but at the end of every mission both teams would step out of their pods and nearly the same time to fall on what passed for food in Archangel base. Fed and hydrated, Bruno would grill them mercilessly on what they'd observed in their respective metaverses. Any clues about Nightmares, any whispers of Monday or of the Masters of the Metaverse - that's what he wanted, sifting through the chaff of extraneous information like a farmer checking grain for rot.

The first few missions spawned a dozen and more leads, and Bruno chased them like a man possessed. More than a dozen missions for each team in less than a week, and only two of those later ones produced actionable intelligence. Bruno had reluctantly decided to split up in the name of time efficiency, sending the other team off to one metaverse and bringing Stone and Harvin with him to the other. He'd have preferred to get his own eyes on both, as he knew approximately what to look for, but he couldn't be in two places at once and time was of the essence.

It was enormously frustrating, then, for both leads to dry up almost immediately. Almost a week and a half since Jaxun, Andi, Aquamarine, and Maxwell had gone to rescue Monday, and he had nothing. Bruno had debriefed both teams thoroughly, then dismissed them for some downtime while he contemplated their next move. It was while the others were shuffling towards the area they'd converted into a makeshift mess when a surprising interruption made itself known.

Patric Leibowitz-O'Kelley came storming in through the door leading to the submarine day and made a beeline for where Bruno was sitting at a table covered in handwritten notes. He didn't even wait for Bruno to acknowledge him before he started talking.

"You're in deep shite now, mate."

Bruno frowned. "I realize that the situation with the 742 tech is pressing, but we have four people MIA. If we don't find them -"

Patric cut him off with a sharp gesture. "It's more than _pressin_ ', it's about to go up in flames. Three new terrorist groups popped up with stuff in just the week I was up North, d'you realize? And I had some a' me old mates reachin' out to me about how China's rushin' to get a pod program going, make their own pilots. Lane's disappeared from his prison, an' I'll give ye three guesses where _he's_ like to have ended up." The Irishman waved his hands, making a helpless gesture that encompassed the room, the pods, and the other pilots who were clearly listening in while pretending not to. "World's goin' to shit, mate. And them in D.C. don't give a _damn_ about who's missin', they want whoever's here up there dealin' with this shite."

Bruno scowled. "We can't just -"

Patric actually grabbed him by the shoulder, giving it a fierce shake. "What ye can't do is _stay here_. They're talking about assault teams, watch lists, kill orders - if ye're not _their_ pilot, ye're the enemy. They're already after the Jaxun kid." He must've seen the hopeful light in Bruno's face and waved his free hand. "His other one, the girl kid. Tessa, I think? They're hunting her. Drones, special force black ops bullshite - I even heard tell about the damned _canine_ squads." He released Bruno's shoulder and took a step back, something like pity in his face. " _Ye can't stay here_ , mate. Ye're needed elsewhere. Yer granddaughter's tough, even for one of us super powered folk. And that Jaxun boy probably knows more about th' Metaverse than everyone else here. Ain't nothin' you can do for 'em from here that they can't do for ‘emselves."

Bruno rested his forehead on his clasped hands, feeling the weight of fifty years a soldier on his soul. Patric was...right. As much as Bruno would like to deny it, there were responsibilities here - responsibilities he could no longer safely ignore. And the other man was right again in that if Andi was stuck somewhere she couldn't get out of, it was highly unlikely Bruno or any of the others would be able to get her out. Bruno was out of leads, out of luck, and out of time.

He swore and slammed his fist into the table, leaving a hefty dent in the surface. Thomas, Harvin, and Robbins looked up from their food, startled, and Patric fell back a step. Bruno sighed as he pushed himself to his feet. "Pack it in, people. All the pods, any advanced tech we're not taking we're scrapping. The pods go in Reese until we hit shore, then we'll find a hauler to take them the rest of the way with us. We needed to be in D.C. _yesterday_."

Nobody moved for a frozen second, eyes full of disbelief and - in the case of Harvin - something like betrayal, and Bruno gritted his teeth.

"We have possible pilots in China and terrorists with 742 tech."

"But what about -" Harvin started, eyes going to the pods, and Bruno shook his head with something like despair bubbling in his gut.

"We have no leads, and _no more time_. If the others can't make it back from wherever they are, we can't help them right now."

Several more seconds of heavy silence went by before John Stone stood up, walked over to a pod, and picked it up like it weighed nothing. Pierce lurched to his feet from where he'd been sitting and leafing through a gossip magazine, and half-staggered half-ran to the pod to begin frantically undoing power connections before Stone could rip them out of the wall. Thomas and Dr. Clarkson stood up to help, though Rosie and Robbins both seemed frozen in disbelief and remained seated.

Bruno was about to join them when a hand on his shoulder stopped him. Patric had snuck up uncomfortably close behind him, and it was all Bruno could do to suppress the reflexive urge to punch the guy. The other man seemed to notice the effort, and stepped back a little.

"Bruno. Somethin’ else."

He hesitated and Bruno raised an eyebrow. The Irishman seemed to be debating whether or not to say something, and eventually seemed to make up his mind. He took a deep breath and looked Bruno in the eye.

"So. Ye're not wholly without allies in D.C., and one of 'em came to speak to me before I came t' get ye. A Colonel Woodrow, retired?" He spoke quietly, and waited for Bruno's confused nod before continuing. "So, ye're not the only one whose had people go missin' on 'em. Whose had soldiers go missin' on 'em. And, well - it's been more'n 24 hours, Bruno. More'n a week. You and I and the old Colonel all know the chances of gettin' 'em back alive after that amount of time."

Bruno clenched his jaw and nodded.The odds weren't good on finding them alive in the first place, not after what they'd gone to do and where they'd gone to do it but -

"Get to the point." His voice was harsh but low, and the other man regarded him for a long moment from behind his preferred sunglasses before reaching into his jacket and pulling out a small envelope and holding it out discreetly.

"Well. The old man asked me to give this to ye - wasn't sealed, so I had a look." Bruno took the envelope with no small amount of trepidation and looked up for further clarification. Patric just shook his head and gestured for him to open it.

Bruno did, and spent a long minute staring at the contents before folding the paper back up and putting it in his inner jacket pocket and nodding the the Irishman.

Both of them turned to the others and began the surprisingly quick process of stripping the base and loading it into Reese. Aside from the ever-growing pile of novels and self-help books Thomas kept pulling out of somewhere Bruno really didn't want to think about, none of them had much in the way of personal possessions. Pierce and Stone had methodically gone through the labs and either stripped or destroyed anything useful, and Harvin had gone through afterwards to rig up some traps for anyone who tried to raid the place in their absence, as unlikely as that was.

For all their work, they were underway before 1600 local - this time with Thomas at the helm to assist Reese in navigating the murky blue waters. The trip back to land was accomplished in nearly suffocating silence; Harvin looked about ready to either break down and cry or start hitting something until _it_ broke down. Thomas spoke quietly to Reese whenever he did speak, and even Dr. Clarkson was more subdued than usual; Robbins appeared to be at a near-total loss for words. Bruno simply sat and contemplated what they were doing - what they were leaving behind, what he could have done better to prevent the others from being lost in the first place.

He was beginning to appreciate why Patric hated submarines.

It wasn't until they'd reached the mainland that Bruno finally spoke again, voice only a little hoarse. "Patric's arranged transport for us; there's a truck waiting on pier 34. I need Patric, Stone, Harvin, Thomas, Dr. Clarkson, and Robbins to load the pods on the truck and escort them overland to the D.C. safehouse - Patric has the location, and will get things set up. I'll take a plane and get to Washington ASAP to begin debriefing Congress on what happened."

His tone didn't leave any room for questions, and while both Patric and Robbins gave him something of a side-eye, the rest of them took it at face value and nodded in agreement. Bruno nodded back sharply and walked over to where Reese had beached himself, tapping on the wooden hull with its bright copper finishings to get the robot's attention.

"Reese."

"Yes?"

"After they finish unloading...I need you to go back to Archangel Base."

The hull shuddered under his hand, and the aborted sounds of transformation clicked from within.

"But there's no booze down there!"

Bruno stayed firm. "If the others make it back, that's the most likely place they'll land. I don't want any nasty surprises waiting for them - I need someone there, Reese. If I could stay there myself, I would. But I can't. So I'm asking you - for the sake of our lost friends, for the sake of the only family I have left in the world - to please, go back down there and keep watch. Wait for them, when the rest of us can't. Please."

The last word felt unpleasantly close to begging, but for Andi Bruno would swallow any pride he had left in a heartbeat.

It seemed to work, thankfully, and Reese settle more heavily in the sand with what sounded like a gusty sigh. "When you put it like that, it would be pretty crummy of me to refuse. Alright, soon as they're done I'll head back and wait."

Bruno patted the hull once and turned to walk purposefully towards the silver Lexus Patric had arranged to take him to the airport. Whether it was some kind of joke or the Irishman's subtle way of trying to be helpful, Bruno was too tired to figure out. Climbing in, he confirmed his destination with the driver and they started off.

The drive was quiet, the driver seeming to sense Bruno's general disinclination to talk - or perhaps just intimidated by his size, he was having difficulty giving a damn about which it really was - and pulling into the airport was relatively painless. He didn't have any baggage with him, and thankfully the Mexican authorities weren't as annoying about bringing handguns on a plane as the American TSA was. It was a five-hour flight North, and Bruno spent most of it dwelling on the contents of the envelope burning a hole in his breast pocket.

When he landed, he went to the car rental desk and rented himself another Lexus - no drivers this time. He drove the car himself, the heavy urban landscape eventually giving way to something greener. It was at once too long and not long enough before he was pulling up to the gates of his destination.

Parking his car, Bruno walked up the rows slowly, the wind tugging at his jacket and shirt feeling as though it was trying to hold him back. Each step was slower than the last in minute increments, but he never stopped and eventually he reached his destination.

Three graves stood before him, two somewhat weather-worn but the last fresh and newly cut.

_Claire Jaymes 1976-1998, Beloved Daughter._

_Lori Jaymes 1951-2018, Loving Mother._

_Andi Jaymes 1992-2020, Lost But Never Forgotten._

The Colonel's letter had been brief but not unkind:

_Sergeant Hamilton,_

_I may have retired years ago, but I still have ears in certain places. I'm sorry for the loss of your granddaughter; the son of mine you saved in Vietnam went MIA less than six months later and never returned._

_The hardest part of any loss is accepting it, in acknowledging there's nothing left that you can do and moving on. My wife and I found that having a physical marker helped in dealing with what happened, so I have arranged for Andi to be memorialized beside her grandmother._

_My sincerest condolences, Colonel Gregory Woodrow (ret)_

Bruno stared down at the grave, the crisp letter slowly crumpling in his grip. Andi was _lost_ , not gone, and if Bruno had more time he _would_ find her. He hadn't gone to ARENA yet, to speak to the pilots there, nor had he visited Joe's Diner. Hollywood knew a great deal, though he never seemed to actually come out and give a straight answer to much. The point remained that he had other avenues that were unexplored...but not the time to explore them.

And that felt like the worst failure of all.

He knelt before the fresh headstone, the ground before it largely undisturbed with no body to bury. He couldn't bring himself to reach out and touch the thing; it seemed like a too-final notation on a situation that hadn't lost all hope yet, like if he touched the words they'd really come true. Like acknowledging her gravestone would mean she truly would never come back.

He huffed a gusty breath and looked to the sky, speaking more to the gravestone beside him than the one in front of him. "I never really thought I'd have kids, you know. Never really thought I'd have a family. Especially not with you, Lori."

His words were as hollow as the crypts a few columns over. He hadn't really had a family with her, not like it should have been. He'd fathered a daughter on her and left, never to return. He'd never known Claire, and had nearly missed knowing Andi. But she was his family now, as surely as the sun rose in the morning.

"I didn't have anyone to leave behind, so I never hesitated. The mission was everything; the worst that would happen if I'd died would be that they'd have to find another man to replace me."

He cleared his throat quietly, the stillness in graveyard taking on an almost listening quality.

"And then you told me I had a granddaughter. I took it as just another mission, at first; get enough money together to provide for her for the rest of her life. As long as she was taken care of, then my mission would have been successful. I was nearly dead when I finally found her, and all I could think to do was to ensure mission success. Tell her about the money I'd put together for her."

He remembered hot sands and blood trickling down his chin from where he'd bitten his lip through dealing with the agony of a gut shot. He remembered a white light, and the pain of a dying hero. He remembered Andi, tears in her eyes, taking one of his enormous, gnarled paws in her hands and smiling at him through the tears.

"She didn't want it, Lori. Took me a while to figure out what she wanted was - "

_Was me_ , he couldn't finish, breath catching in his throat. All Andi had wanted was a family and he'd taken - too long - to figure that out.

And now she was gone, and he couldn't guarantee when or even if she'd return. Couldn't go out and find her like he'd done two years ago, tracking her all across the globe as TOM - the TOM he'd come to hate - had kept her just ahead of him the whole time.

He turned to address the headstone in front of him directly.

"Andi, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I couldn't keep you safe. I'm so very sorry that you went on that mission without me. If..." he trailed off. If he could have, he'd have gone in her stead. If he could have, he'd have gone with. If he could have, she'd be here and _safe_ with her friends and this old soldier would be MIA, as was a fitting end for him.

But he couldn't make any of that true. Not by kneeling here in front of a grave for someone he refused to believe was dead. He sighed and stood, brushing the grass off knees that didn't protest the motion. Bruno remembered when his knee had twinged at every third step, had screamed when the barometer dipped, had refused to bend correctly after more than a few minutes of running. He felt _old_ , his seventy years belied by the black of his hair and the breadth of his shoulders.

He started to turn and leave, then hesitated a moment.

"Grandfathers should never outlive their grandchildren."

He headed towards the entrance to the graveyard, wind tugging at his coat, and didn't look back.


End file.
